


The One Where Nori is a Reliable Young Guard and Dwalin is a Thief

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Series: Nwalin Week 2015 [3]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 12:14:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3936370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Prompt 3: Do I Know You?<br/>The third of my Nwalin Week 2015 pieces, set in my currently very cobbled-together Thief!Dwalin AU.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fundin's barbarian son did not have the hands for theft.<br/>Nori was not the typical stock for an Ered Luin guards-dwarrow.<br/>And yet, here they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Where Nori is a Reliable Young Guard and Dwalin is a Thief

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a heavily-summarized beginning to what will hopefully someday be a larger story.  
> So, please forgive all the time skips and overuse of exposition.
> 
> Important to know:  
> I've stolen from someone else's fic (I don't remember whose, sorry...!) the idea of a "mother's son"; that is, a Dwarf identifying their lineage through their mother -- usually because their mother had several lovers, or gave birth out of wedlock. In terms of Dwarves with same-sex parents, I figure they would identify themselves with both names, so it is only this particular sort of case which would identify with just the mother's name. Since the 'Ri's all have different fathers but are close enough to want to be associated as brothers, they would identify themselves as "sons of Sigrun" and be considered mother's sons. I hope that makes sense?

Fundin’s barbarian son did not have the hands for theft – his fat fingers were too big and clumsy for picking pockets, better suited to clutching axes as he roared across a battlefield. His appearance, conspicuous by dint of his size, around the area of several pocket-pickings was mere coincidence. Or, he was finally making use of himself in an attempt to catch the notorious thief. Finally making something of himself, following in his father’s footsteps as a law enforcer, since he was too much of a clod to take up the intricacies of law itself like his brother. That’s what everyone said, anyway.

Only Dwalin and Balin knew how very wrong they were.

 

It started from necessity, like most things. It started from Dwalin’s size, it started from his surly attitude, it started because he was tired of being looked at like a criminal when he was only trying to do honest work for his king and family. Dwalin, son of Fundin, was tired of being eyed like a thief for no reason.

So he became one.

 

He and Thorin had been run out of town. Not for any real reason, mind. But because a few of the tavern women had taken a shine to Thorin’s looks – Mahal, the race of Men had such strange ideals of beauty – and propositioned him for something the men of the town were not altogether comfortable with them giving.

Not that Thorin would have accepted, because he wouldn’t. But that wasn’t the point of it with Mannish towns. Any suspicion, any proposition, and a mob was at the door.

That one was led by the Man who’d hired them on as assistant blacksmiths – as if Dwarrows could be anything less than masters at their own crafts, especially compared to the likes of Men – and the brutish son of the innkeeper.

“Balin,” Thorin had said urgently. “We’re going. Now. Get the rest of the lads.”

But, being the noble princeling he was, Thorin had stayed behind to the last Dwarf, to make sure everyone else had got out alright. And Dwalin, who’d been all but ordered to look after him by Eirdis – and an order from a prince’s mother mattered more than an order from a prince – stayed with him. Even if she hadn’t, they all knew the idiot couldn’t take care of himself, and his sense of overground direction was absolute Warg shite. Which left them two Dwarrows armed only with rudimentary smithing tools cornered in in an inn room by a bunch of rowdy Men.

And Dwalin would swear on Durin’s beard it was the best damn brawl he’d ever had the pleasure to be a part of.

There were farm tools and poorly-smithed swords in every direction. Thorin was wielding a pair of tongs overhand like they were an axe. And Dwalin had a hammer in one hand and a poorly-cobbled-together strip of metal – originally the handles off the washbasin – bound around the knuckles of the other.

He bashed the innkeeper’s son one good in the back of the leg and that was all she wrote, but the blacksmith was a tough Man, and took more effort. Thorin, meanwhile, was sending villagers to the ground like a scythe in a wheatfield – though it was easy enough to tell that he was being careful to get them out of the way with as little injury all around as possible. A good prince.

And Dwalin was honestly attempting the same, though his stature made it a chore – until the blacksmith managed to swipe Thorin with his blade, drawing a swath of blood to the prince’s dominant shoulder. That was the moment Dwalin decided to leave the princeliness to his much more capable prince.

 

The fight lasted only a few minutes, though it’d seemed longer. Soon the room was quiet save for the heaving breaths of two sweaty Dwarrows, and Men were sprawled in all directions.

“Go on, then,” Dwalin said, breaking the moment in two. “I’ll clear this all away, you catch up to Balin and the others.”

Thorin looked about to protest, but Dwalin just grinned and shoved him towards the window, and the makeshift rope tied to it. In the end, the prince trusted his guard enough to just go. Dwalin, alone, began hauling unconscious bodies away from the door. It’d be rude to block the entrance, and aside the innkeeper’s son, none of the staff had done them any harm.

Dwalin would normally have decided that the blacksmith would be suffering enough with the sharp blow to the face and the way his left hand was broken, but then something spiteful and petty took over him, and as he hauled the man into a pile with the rest of the unconscious mob, he patted him down for something to take. Something that would make him regret charging after them, even more than his injuries did.

Dwalin came away with a satchel of silver and the man’s gold marriage band.

“You’ll be missing that in the morning, won’tcha, you big bastard?” the Dwarf muttered to himself, tying the money to his belt, but spinning the ring on his finger like a child’s top.

It’d fetch a good price in another town, where no one recognized it – enough to get Princess Dis’s lads a little extra to eat – a small cake or two, perhaps.

 

Dwalin was still smirking a bit to himself when he finally caught up to Thorin, who was accompanied by Balin, on the outskirts of the village. Balin’s lips pressed tightly together upon seeing the ring, but he said nothing. And Dwalin didn’t smile or scowl or anything. Just strode past and looked back at him.

“Coming, brother?” he asked, as if there was any chance Balin was staying behind in that wretched place.

“I’m coming.”

And though Balin never said anything when Dwalin’s satchel was a little heavier, when he took trophies not just from brawls but brazenly on the street without even batting an eye – picking pockets like a common street urchin – the scholar never looked at his brother quite the same again. A small price to pay, to put big smiles on small faces, Dwalin consoled himself. The princess’s lads were well-fed and happy, and that meant Thorin and Dis and Eirdis held less weight on their shoulders – and the weight of Balin’s silent scrutiny was nothing to that eased load.

 

By all means, when Ered Luin had become reasonably prosperous, Dwalin ought to have stopped picking pockets. Yes, ought to have. And by all means, he smiled at Balin with simple ease and acted like he had. But the itch to take had become so much a part of him, a compulsion – and when a particularly rude Dwarf merchant passed through, insulting all they’d worked so hard to scrape together, or a Man tried to cheat them, it zipped like fire under the skin of his fingers until he took something, anything, to sate the need for fairness, for a simple and petty revenge.

And it was so, so easy. Laughably so. Because who would suspect such a big brute like Dwalin of ever using such roundabout means to settle a score, when surely he’d just tighten his knuckledusters and smash them in the face?

And though the guards-dwarrows tried and tried, they never caught the thief.

 

Nori was not the typical stock for an Ered Luin guards-dwarrow. Lean and poor and with his ostentatious looks, he hardly fit with the other guards – traditional, blocky, well-to-do, all with spotless clean records. But with some miracle of luck, Alfdis, the captain of the guard herself, had seen fit to give him work. She had seen the hungry look in his eyes, teetering so close to the edge. She had seen an angry young Dwarf with nowhere to go but down, a street brawler determined to keep his family fed, to pay for his little brother’s apprenticeship, and she had offered him a way out.

Dori had been desperately proud, crushing Nori in a hug that was both painfully tight and so validating that Nori thought nothing could ever hurt again. Ori, too, was thrilled. The pay was more than enough to supplement Dori’s income, and Nori finally felt _worth something_ instead of a deadweight on their family.

And then Alfdis had assigned him to the pickpocketing case.

 

Alfdis had added more guards-dwarrows to the pickpocketing case – as she ought to have, truthfully. And they led bordering divisions – Thorin’s bodyguards and the regular enforcers of law in Ered Luin – so Dwalin had learned of the new arrangement almost as soon as it happened. Of course, any fool with half a brain would have used that as an excellent excuse to fight the red-hot itch to steal.

Not so, for Dwalin.

Apparently because he had less than half a brain. But it only went to show everyone else had less than that, for not even bothering to suspect him. And if there was a guilty tic in his jaw, it meant very little. Balin and Thorin didn’t know, though they very likely suspected, and that was all that mattered. That he could be causing Ered Luin trade trouble was a near-constant thought in Dwalin’s mind, but even that couldn’t override the feel of something small and not quite his own cooling his palm.

And so he found himself in the marketplace, once again, though patrols had been doubled.

 

Nori was on-duty, scanning the crowd, when his eyes caught sharply on a particular Dwarf and refused to move on. The Dwarf in question was massive – both tall and broad, carrying himself nobly, and absolutely covered in inked runes. They laced up both his bare forearms and crowned his skull in an arc from ear to ear over the top of his shorn head. What hair he had – long in the back, and a simple moustache and beard – was coarse-looking and unadorned. The stranger walked like a lord but dressed like a barbarian, and Nori could actually feel his own jaw dropping as he stared.

In fact, he only snapped from his reverie when a particularly shrill pair of noblewomen twenty paces to his left realized loudly that they had lost the jeweled pins from their bags, causing him to turn their way in alarm. And then Nori realized that – given the time lapse between a theft and the discovery of it – their pins had likely been taken just as his mystery Dwarf brushed past them.

“It’s always the handsome ones,” the guard muttered to himself, hurriedly turning his head again to try and find his suspect.

The big Dwarf locked eyes with him and smirked in a way that had burning red rushing to Nori’s cheeks. A glittering purple pin flashed between the Dwarf’s thick fingers.

The word “thief” was halfway up Nori’s throat when suddenly his name was being shouted.

“Come on!” exclaimed Brika, the Dwarf he’d been paired with for his patrol, snatching up Nori’s arm and tugging him away. “Shift change! We’re to head down to the East Gate to relieve Sindri and Kara!”

When Nori looked back again, the tattooed Dwarf was gone.

 

On the way to the East Gate, he casually picked Brika’s brain about the strange Dwarf, describing him as one might a particularly striking stranger, wary to reveal his hand when the criminal walked like a member of nobility.

“Oh, you must mean Lord Dwalin!” Brika mused. “Figures you’d set your sights high – I hear he’s a true warrior and no mistake. He was Lord Fundin’s second son, after Lord Balin, you see. Why, he even leads King Thorin’s personal guards. I’ve never seen him much in public, though he comes to visit Captain Alfdis every so often. Still unmarried, though, so you’ve a chance if you’re that brave.”

Nori was most certainly _not_ that brave. He asked Brika nothing more and they spent the rest of the day in a pensive, uncomfortable silence. When he returned home that evening, Nori still didn’t know what to do with the information he’d been presented with.

How do you accuse a lord, the King’s confidant and shield-brother, of being a thief?

You don’t. That’s how you get put in jail. Only an idiot would try. And yet, how would it reflect on him to keep silent, knowing who the thief was? To, regardless, be making little to no headway in the case?

It was a conundrum without a solution. So Nori sulked and brooded and prodded at the stew Dori had cooked for supper and wondered how to go about snaring a noble thief.

 

“What can you tell me about a guard named Nori?”

The guard captain looked up, eyes wide, and her hand itched towards her carefully-plaited black hair. Then she realized who she was looking at and banged her thighs on her desk as she stood to salute.

“Lord Dwalin!”

He tipped his head respectfully and repeated his question.

“Ah, well. He's one of the younger guards. A twitchy sort, but I don't think he's dishonest. Very light on his feet. I’ve assigned him to the pickpocketing case.”

“Good,” Dwalin agreed, closing his eyes as he nodded and watching the image of the guard’s ostentatiously beautiful red hair dancing behind his eyelids. “But what’s his lineage, Alfdis?”

She blinked. Then frowned.

“Son of… Sigrun. So I heard.”

Dwalin made a noncommittal noise.

“A mother’s son then.”

It made sense – the slight air of tension to his small frame, as if constantly under attack. But such handsome features. And much quicker on the uptake than anyone else had been – a Dwarf to watch out for, this son of Sigrun.

“Yes,” confirmed Alfdis. “I hear his elder brother owns the tinker’s shop across from the teahouse, and the younger has started studying scribework under your brother, Lord Balin.”

“Thank you, Captain. That’s all I needed.”

Dwalin dipped his head politely as he departed, and Alfdis gave a sharp salute before returning to her desk.

 

In the end, Nori had no plan. There was no plan to be had.

So on his next available break, he squared his shoulders and grabbed his mace and marched to the office where Dwalin son of Fundin spent most of his days fielding complaints and discipline problems in the ranks King Thorin’s bodyguards. The door was closed but unlocked, so Nori marched in before he could second-guess his not-plan to confront Dwalin by himself.

“Do I know you?” the brute of a noble asked immediately as the door closed, with his feet kicked up on his desk like a delinquent dwarfling and turning an axe over in his big hands.

Dwalin’s eyes stayed on the weapon like it was the most interesting thing in the world. Nori swallowed down the thick feeling in his throat and _was not_ intimidated.

“No. But I know who you are.”

Dwalin thumbed his axeblade idly, and did not look up.

“A lot of Dwarrows know who I am,” he retorted, and did not rankle at the staff-length mace held in the ginger Dwarf’s hand like a warning.

“You’re the thief,” Nori accused, sure and not trembling, but hesitant nonetheless. “The one who’s been stealing from nobles and merchants.”

Dwalin at last looked up, and the rude humor in his dark eyes set Nori on edge.

“Of the two of us,” said Dwalin calmly, gesturing between them with the axe, “I think you are more likely to be suspected of thiefish inclinations. Your fingers are nimble, are they not?”

“So are yours!”

Dwalin held out a hand. A broad, square palm, thick fingers, wrapped tightly in a knuckle-duster that would impede the amount of movement necessary to pick pockets. Nori’s grip on his mace tightened. But Dwalin’s expression was not threatening, or cocky. Just lordly and assured.

“I don’t want to fight you, son of Sigrun,” he said at last, heaving a sigh as he stood. “But I will.”

And then Nori was afraid. A tight fear, fluttering fear – the kind that had gotten him into fights and trouble and more fights.

_Son of Sigrun._

It meant that Dwalin knew about Ori and Dori. He _knew_. And though Nori tightened his grip on the long-handled mace, used it as a lifeline, already pale knuckles squeezed paler, still he gasped for breath. Dwalin’s eyes narrowed, glinting with something almost concern but not quite, and he tipped his tattooed head slightly.

“Your family’s important to you. Good.”

No. Not good. Not good at all. If Nori didn’t care about his brothers so much, he would not be so afraid. He would not have found himself about to be blackmailed for their safety, he would not—

And then Dwalin was setting down his axe, stripping off his knuckle-dusters, slipping a dagger from a holster on his chest and placing it carefully on the tabletop. Nori no longer understood what was going on.

“You’re a good guard, Nori. A good Dwarf,” said Dwalin, crossing his big, brutal, impossible arms over his chest. “But I have a family to look after too. And my brother is not gonna hear about this.”

With that, Nori had the pinching, infuriating feeling he was being dismissed. But to argue further would end unpleasantly, and if there was one thing he had learned growing up poor, growing up a mother’s son, it was how to pick his battles.

He left.


End file.
